Her gratitude to Wayne for that very understanding made her regret the more her inability to be frank with him about the man who mended the boats.  She had had to tell him at first that he was helping, but Wayne had seemed to think it so strange, had appeared so little pleased with the idea, that she had not seen it as possible to make a clean breast of it.  She told him that she had talked with him about Ann—­that was because he had seen her, knew more about it than she did.  And that she had talked with him again the day Ann left, thinking he might have seen her.  That Wayne had not liked.  “You should have sent for me,” he said.  “Never take outsiders into your confidence in intimate matters like that.”

And what she had not found it possible to try to make clear to him was that the man who mended the boats seemed to her anything but an outsider.

And if he had not seemed so in those days of early summer, he seemed infinitely less so now.  She talked with him of things of which she could not talk with anyone else.  In those talks it was all the rest of the people of the world who were the outsiders.

He had been there several times during the summer.  Katie knew now that he did not mean to spend all his life mending boats.  He was writing a play; it was things in relation to that brought him to Chicago.  Katie wanted to know about the play, but when she asked he told her, rather shortly, that he did not believe she would like it.  He qualified it with saying he did not know that anyone would like it.

When he was there he went about with her as she looked for Ann.

Every day she pursued her search, now in this way, now in that.  That search brought her a vision of the city she would have had in no other way.  It was that vision, revealed, interpreted, by her anxiety for Ann brought the sleepless nights and the ceaseless imagery and imaginings which caused her army friends to wish that dear Katie would marry before she, as they more feelingly than lucidly put it, lost out that way.

She thought sometimes of Ann’s moving picture show, showing her the things of which she had dreamed.  All this, things seen in her search, had become to Katie as a moving picture show.  It moved before her awake and asleep; “called” to her.

She would stand outside the stores as the girls were coming out at night.  Stores, factories, all places where girls worked she watched that way.  By the hundreds, thousands, she saw them filling the city’s streets as through the long summer one hot day after another drew to a close.  Often she would crowd into the street cars they were crowding into, rush with them for the elevated trains, or follow them across the river and see them disappear into boarding-house and rooming-house, those hot, crowded places waiting to receive them after the hot, crowded day.  Sometimes she would go for lunch to the places she saw them going to—­always searching, and as she searched, wondering, and as she wondered, sorrowing.